"The Patagonia," not a masterpiece. Slow in opening, excellent in parts,
but the sense of the finale intrudes all along. It seems true but there
is no alternative ending. One doubts whether a story is really
constructed with any mastery when the end, for the purpose of making it
a story, is so unescapable. The effect of reality is produced, of
course, by the reality of the people in the opening scene; there is no
doubt about that part being "to the life."
"The Liar" is superb in its way, perhaps the best of the allegories, of
the plots invented purely to be an exposition of impression. It is
magnificent in its presentation of the people, both the old man and the
Liar, who is masterly.
"Mrs. Temperly" is another such excellent delineation and shows James as
an excellent hater, but G.S. Street expresses a concentration of
annoyance with a greater polish and suavity in method; and neither
explains, theorizes, nor comments.
James never has De Maupassant's reality. His (H.J.'s) people almost
always convince, i.e., we believe implicitly that they exist. We also
think that Henry James has made up some sort of story as an excuse for
writing his impression of the people.
One sees the slight vacancy of the stories of this period, the short
clear sentence, the dallying with _jeu d'esprit_, with epigram no better
than, though not inferior to, the run of epigram in the nineties. It all
explains James's need of opacity, his reaching out for a chiaroscuro to
distinguish himself from his contemporaries and in which he could put
the whole of his much more complex apperception.
Then comes, roughly, the period of cobwebs and of excessive cobwebs and
of furniture, finally justified in "The Finer Grain," a book of tales
with no mis-fire, and the style so vindicated in the triumphs of the
various books of Memoirs and "The American Scene."
Fantasias: "Dominic Ferrand," "Nona Vincent" (tales obviously aimed at
the "Yellow Book," but seem to have missed it, a detour in James's
career). All artists who discover anything make such detours and must,
in the course of things (as in the cobwebs), push certain experiments
beyond the right curve of their art. This is not so much the doom as the
function of all "revolutionary" or experimental art, and I think
masterwork is usually the result of the return from such excess. One
does not know, simply does not know, the true curve until one has pushed
one's method beyond it. Until then it is merely a frontier, not a chosen
route. It is an open question, and there is no dogmatic answer, whether
an artist should write and rewrite the same story (à la Flaubert) or
whether he should take a new canvas.
"The Papers," a fantasia, diverting; "The Birthplace," fairy-godmother
element mentioned above, excellent. "Edmund Orme," inferior; "Yellow
Book" tale, not accepted by that periodical.
1889-1893. Period of this entoilment in the "Yellow Book," short
sentences, the epigrammatic. He reacts from this into the allegorical.
In general the work of this period is not up to the mark. "The
Chaperon," "The Real Thing," fantasias of "wit." By fantasias I mean
sketches in which the people are "real" or convince one of their verity,
but where the story is utterly unconvincing, is not intended to
convince, is merely a sort of exaggeration of the fitting situation or
the situation which ought to result in order to display some type at its
apogee. "The Real Thing" rather better than other stories in this
volume.
Thus the lady and gentleman model in "The Real Thing." London society is
finely ladled in "The Chaperon," which is almost as a story,
romanticism.
"Greville Fane" is a scandalous photograph from the life about which the
great blagueur scandalously lies in his preface (collected edition). I
have been too diverted comparing it with _an_ original to give a sane
view of its art.
1890. "The Tragic Muse," uneven, full of good things but showing Henry
James in the didactic role a little too openly. He preaches, he also
displays fine perception of the parochialism of the British political
career. It is a readable novel with tracts interpolated. (Excellent and
commendable tracts arguing certainly for the right thing, enjoyable,
etc.) Excellent text-book for young men with ambitions, etc.
1892. "Lesson of the Master" (cobweb). "The Pupil," a masterpiece, one
of his best and keenest studies. "Brooksmith" of the best.
1893. "The Private Life." Title story, waste verbiage at the start,
ridiculous to put all this camouflage over something au fond merely an
idea. Not life, not people, allegory, dated to "Yellow Book" era. Won't
hold against "Candide." H.J.'s tilting against the vacuity of the
public figure is, naturally, pleasing, i.e., it is pleasing that he
should tilt, but the amusement partakes of the nature of seeing
cocoanuts hurled at an aunt sally.
There are other stories, good enough to be carried by H.J.'s best work,
not detrimental, but not enough to have "made him": "Europe"
(Hawthorny), "Paste," "The Middle Years," "Broken Wings," etc. Part of
the great man's work can perhaps only be criticized as "etc."
1895. "Terminations, Coxon Fund," perhaps best of this lot, a
disquisition, but entertaining, perhaps the germ of Galsworthy to be
found in it (to no glory of either author) as perhaps a residuum of
Dickens in Maisie's Mrs. Wix. Verbalism, but delightful verbalism in
Coxon affair, sic:
"Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener looked as blank and
parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular,"
or
"a deeply wronged, justly resentful, quite irreproachable and
insufferable person"
or (for the whole type)
"put such ignorance into her cleverness?"
Miss Anvoy's echo concerning "a crystal" is excellently introduced, but
is possibly in the nature of a sleight of hand trick (contemporary with
"Lady Windemere's Fan"). Does H.J.'s "politics" remind one of Dizzy's
scribbling, just a little?" Confidence, under the new Ministry, was
understood to be reviving," etc.
Perhaps one covers the ground by saying that the James of this period is
"light literature," entertaining if one have nothing better to do.
Neither "Terminations" nor (1896) "Embarrassments" would have founded a
reputation.
1896-97. Improvement through "Other House" and "Spoils of Poynton." I
leave the appreciation of these, to me, detestable works to Mr. Hueffer.
They seem to me full of a good deal of needless fuss, though I do not
mean to deny any art that may be in them.
1897. The emergence in "What Maisie Knew." Problem of the adolescent
female. Carried on in:
1899. "The Awkward Age," fairy godmother and spotless lamb and all the
rest of it. Only real thing the impression of people, not observation or
real knowledge. Action only to give reader the tone, symbolizing the
tone of the people. Opening _tour de force_, a study in punks, a cheese
_soufflé_ of the leprous crust of society done to a turn and a niceness
save where he puts on the _dulcissimo, vox humana_, stop. James was the
dispassionate observer. He started with the moral obsession; before he
had worked clear of it he was entoiled in the obsession of social tone.
He has pages of clear depiction, even of satire, but the sentimentalist
is always lurking just round the corner. This softens his edges. He has
not the clear hardness, the cold satiric justness that G.S. Street has
displayed in treating situations, certain struggles between certain
idiocies and certain vulgarities. This book is a spécialité of local
interest. It is an étude in ephemera. If it contained any revelation in
1899, it no longer contains it. His characters are reduced to the status
of _voyeurs_, elaborate analysis of the much too special cases, a bundle
of swine and asses who cannot mind their own business, who do not know
enough to mind their own business. James's lamentable lack of the
classics is perhaps responsible for his absorption in bagatelles.... He
has no real series of backgrounds of _mœurs du passé_, only the
"sweet dim faded lavender" tune and in opposition to modernity, plush
nickel-plated, to the disparagement, naturally, of the latter.
Kipling's "Bigod, now-I-know-all-about-this manner," is an annoyance,
but one wonders if parts of Kipling by the sheer force of content, of
tale to tell, will not outlast most of James's cobwebs. There is no
substitute for narrative-sense, however many different and entrancing
charms may be spread before us.
"The Awkward Age" might have been done, from one point of view, as
satire, in one-fourth the space. On the other hand, James does give us
the subtly graded atmospheres of his different houses most excellently.
And indeed, this may be regarded as _his_ subject.
If one were advocate instead of critic, one would definitely claim that
these atmospheres, nuances, impressions of personal tone and quality
_are his subject;_ that in these he gets certain things that almost no
one else had done before him. These timbres and tonalities are his
stronghold, he is ignorant of nearly everything else. It is all very
well to say that modern life is largely made up of velleities,
atmospheres, timbres, nuances, etc., but if people really spent as much
time fussing, to the extent of the Jamesian fuss about such normal
trifling, age-old affairs, as slight inclinations to adultery, slight
disinclinations to marry, to refrain from marrying, etc., etc., life
would scarcely be worth the bother of keeping on with it. It is also
contendable that one must depict such mush in order to abolish it.[10]
The main feeling in "The Awkward Age" is satiric. The dashes of
sentiment do not help the work as literature. The acute observer is
often referred to:
Page 131. "The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have
detected...."
Page 133. "And it might have been apparent still to our sharp
spectator...."
Page 310. "But the acute observer we are constantly taking for granted
would perhaps have detected...."
Page 323. "A supposititious spectator would certainly have imagined...."
(This also occurs in "Ivory Tower." Page 196.)
This scrutinous person wastes a great deal of time in pretending to
conceal his contempt for Mrs. Brook, Vanderbank, the other punks, and
lays it on so _thick_ when presenting his old sentimentalist Longdon,
who at the one critical moment behaves _with a stupidity,_ with a lack
of delicacy, since we are dealing with these refinements. Of course
neither this stupidity of his action nor the tone of the other
characters has anything to do with the question of _mæstria_, if they
_were_ dispassionately or impartially rendered. The book is weak because
all through it James is so manifestly carrying on a long _tenzone_ so
fiercely and loudly, a long argument _for_ the old lavender. There is
also the constant implication that Vanderbank ought to want Nanda,
though why the devil he should be supposed to be even mildly under this
obligation, is not made clear. A basis in the classics, castor oil, even
Stevenson's "Virginibus Puerisque" might have helped matters. One's
complaint is not that people of this sort don't exist, that they aren't
like everything else a subject for literature, but that James doesn't
anywhere in the book get down to bed-rock. It is too much as if he were
depicting stage scenery not _as_ stage scenery, but as nature.
All this critique is very possibly an exaggeration. Take it at half its
strength; I do not intend to defend it.
Epigrammatic manner in opening, compare Kipling; compare De Maupassant,
superb ideas, verity, fantasia, fantasia group, reality, charming
stories, poppycock. "Yellow Book" touches in "The Real Thing," general
statements about their souls, near to bad writing, perfectly lucid.
"Nona Vincent," he writes like an adolescent, might be a person of
eighteen doing first story.
Page 201. "Public interest in spiritual life of the army." ("The Real
Thing.")
Page 201. German Invasion.
Loathsome prigs, stiff conventions, editor of cheap magazines ladled in
Sir Wots-his-name.
1893. In the interim he had brought out "In the Cage," excellent
opening sentence, matter too much talked around and around, and "The Two
Magics." This last a Freudian affair which seems to me to have attracted
undue interest, i.e., interest out of proportion to the importance as
literature and _as part of_ Henry James's own work, because of this
subject matter. The obscenity of "The Turn of the Screw" has given it
undue prominence. People now "drawn" to obscene as were people of
Milton's period by an equally disgusting bigotry; one unconscious on
author's part; the other, a surgical treatment of a disease. Thus much
for progress on part of authors if public has not progressed. The point
of my remarks is that an extraneous criterion comes in. One must keep to
the question of literature, not of irrelevancies. Galdos' "Lo Prohibido"
does Freud long before the sex crank got to it. Kipling really does the
psychic, ghosts, etc., to say nothing of his having the "sense of
story."
1900. "The Soft Side," collection containing: "The Abasement of the
Northmores," good; again the motif of the vacuity of the public man, the
"figure"; he has tried it again in "The Private Life," which, however,
falls into the allegorical. A rotten fall it is too, and Henry James at
his worst in it, i.e., the allegorical. "Fordham's Castle" appears in
the collected edition only--it may belong to this period but is probably
earlier, comedietta, excellently, perhaps flawlessly done. Here, as so
often, the circumstances are mostly a description of the character of
the personal tone of the "sitters"; for his people are so much more, or
so much more often, "sitters" than actors. Protagonists it may be. When
they act, they are apt to stage-act, which reduces their action again to
being a mere attempt at description. ("The Liar," for example.) Compare
Maupassant's "Toine" for treatment of case similar to "Fordham Castle."
1902-05. "The Sacred Fount," "Wings of a Dove," "Golden Bowl" period.
"Dove" and "Bowl" certainly not models for other writers, a caviare not
part of the canon (metaphors be hanged for the moment).
Henry James is certainly not a model for narrative novelists, for young
writers of fiction; perhaps not even a subject of study till they have
attained some sublimity of the critical sense or are at least ready to
be constantly alert, constantly on guard.
I cannot see that he will harm a critic or a describer of places, a
recorder of impressions, whether they be people, places, music.
1903. "Better Sort," mildish.
1903. "The Ambassadors," rather clearer than the other work. Etude of
Paris vs. Woollett. Exhortation to the idle, well-to-do, to leave home.
1907. "The American Scene," triumph of the author's long practice. A
creation of America. A book no "serious American" will neglect. How many
Americans make any attempt toward a realization of that country is of
course beyond our power to compute. The desire to see the national face
in a mirror may be in itself an exotic. I know of no such grave record,
of no such attempt at faithful portrayal, as "The American Scene." Thus
America is to the careful observer; this volume and the American scenes
in the fiction and memoirs, in "The Europeans," "The Patagonia,"
"Washington Square," etc., bulk large in the very small amount of
writing which can be counted as history of _mœurs contemporaines,_ of
national habit of our time and of the two or three generations
preceding us. Newport, the standardized face, the Capitol, Independence
Hall, the absence of penetralia, innocence, essential vagueness, etc.,
language "only definable as not in _intention_ Yiddish," the tabernacle
of Grant's ashes, the public collapse of the individual, the St. Gaudens
statue. There is nothing to be gained by making excerpts; the volume is
large, but one should in time drift through it. I mean any American with
pretenses to an intellectual life should drift through it. It is not
enough to have perused "The Constitution" and to have "heerd tell" of
the national founders.
1910. "The Finer Grain," collection of short stories without a slip.
"The Velvet Glove," "Mona Montravers," "A Round of Visits" (the old New
York versus the new), "Crapey Cornelia," "The Bench of Desolation."
It is by beginning on this collection, or perhaps taking it after such
stories as "The Pupil" and "Brooksmith," that the general literate
reader will best come to James, must in brief be convinced of him and
can tell whether or not the "marginal" James is for him. Whether or no
the involutions of the "Golden Bowl" will titillate his arcane
sensibilities. If the reader does not "get" "The Finer Grain" there is
no sense in his trying the more elaborate "Wings of a Dove," "Sacred
Fount," "Golden Bowl." If, on the contrary, he does feel the peculiar,
unclassic attraction of the author he may or may not enjoy the
uncanonical books.
1911. "The Outcry," a relapse. Connoisseurship fad again, inferior work.
1913. "A Small Boy and Others," the beginning of the memoirs. Beginning
of this volume disgusting. First three pages enough to put one off Henry
James once and for all, damn badly written, atrocious vocabulary. Page
33, a few lines of good writing. Reader might start about here, any
reader, that is, to whom New York of that period is of interest. New
York of the fifties is significant, in so far as it is typical of what a
hundred smaller American cities have been since. The tone of the work
shows in excerpts:
"The special shade of its identity was thus that it was not
conscious--really not conscious of anything in the world; or was
conscious of so few possibilities at least, and these so immediate and
so a matter of course, that it came almost to the same thing. That was
the testimony that the slight subjects in question strike me as having
borne to their surrounding medium--the fact that their unconsciousnes
could be so preserved...."
Or later, when dealing with a pre-Y.-M.-C.-A. America.
"Infinitely queer and quaint, almost incongruously droll, the sense
somehow begotten in ourselves, as very young persons, of our being
surrounded by a slightly remote, yet dimly rich, outer and quite kindred
circle of the tipsy. I remember how, once, as a very small boy, after
meeting in the hall a most amiable and irreproachable gentleman, all but
closely consanguineous, who had come to call on my mother, I anticipated
his further entrance by slipping in to report to that parent that I
thought _he_ must be tipsy. And I was to recall perfectly afterwards the
impression I so made on her--in which the general proposition that the
gentlemen of a certain group or connection might on occasion be best
described by the term I had used, sought to destroy the particular
presumption that our visitor wouldn't, by his ordinary measure, show
himself for one of these. He didn't to all appearance, for I was
afterwards disappointed at the lapse of lurid evidence: that memory
remained with me, as well as a considerable subsequent wonder at my
having leaped to so baseless a view...."
"The grim little generalization remained, none the less, and I may speak
of it--since I speak of everything--as still standing: the striking
evidence that scarce aught but disaster _could_, in that so unformed and
unseasoned society, overtake young men who were in the least exposed.
Not to have been immediately launched in business of a rigorous sort was
to _be_ exposed--in the absence, I mean, of some fairly abnormal
predisposition to virtue; since it was a world so simply constituted
that whatever wasn't business, or exactly an office or a "store," places
in which people sat close and made money, was just simply pleasure,
sought, and sought only, in places in which people got tipsy. There was
clearly no mean, least of all the golden one, for it was just the ready,
even when the moderate, possession of gold that determined, that hurried
on disaster. There were whole sets and groups, there were 'sympathetic,'
though too susceptible, races, that seemed scarce to recognize or to
find possible any practical application of moneyed, that is, of
transmitted ease, however limited, but to go more or less rapidly to the
bad with it--which meant even then going as often as possible to
Paris...."
"The field was strictly covered, to my young eyes, I make out, by three
classes, the busy, the tipsy, and Daniel Webster...."
"It has carried me far from my rather evident proposition that if we saw
the 'natural' so happily embodied about us--and in female maturity, or
comparative maturity, scarce less than in female adolescence--this was
because the artificial, or in other words the complicated, was so little
there to threaten it...."
On page 72 he quotes his father on "flagrant morality." In Chapter X we
have a remarkable portrayal of a character by almost nothing save
vacuums, "timorous philistine in a world of dangers." Our author notes
the "finer civility" but does not see that it is a thing of no period.
It is the property of a few individuals, personally transmitted. Henry
James had a mania for setting these things in an era or a "faubourg,"
despite the continued testimony that the worst manners have constantly
impinged upon the most brilliant societies; that decent detail of
conduct is a personal talent.
The production of "Il Corteggiano" proves perhaps nothing more than the
degree in which Castiglione's contemporaries "needed to be told." On
page 236 ("Small Boy and Others") the phrase "presence without type." On
page 286, the people "who cultivated for years the highest
instructional, social and moral possibilities of Geneva." Page 283,
"discussion of a work of art mainly hung in those days on that issue of
the producible _name_." Page 304, "For even in those days some Americans
were rich and several sophisticated." Page 313, The real give away of
W.J. Page 341, Scarification of Ste-Beuve. Page 179, Crystal Palace.
Page 214, Social relativity.
One is impatient for Henry James to do people.
A LITTLE TOUR IN FRANCE. The disadvantage of giving impressions of real
instead of imaginary places is that they conflict with other people's
impressions. I do not see Angoulême via Balzac, nor do I feel Henry
James's contacts with the places where our tracks have crossed very
remarkable. I dare say it is a good enough guide for people more
meagrely furnished with associations or perceptions. Allow me my
_piéton's_ shrug for the man who has gone only by train.
Henry James is not very deep in ancient associations. The American's
enjoyment of England in "The Passionate Pilgrim" is more searching than
anything continental. Windy generality in "Tour in France," and perhaps
indication of how little Henry James's tentacles penetrated into any era
before 1600, or perhaps before 1780.
Vignette bottom of page 337-8 ("Passionate Pilgrim") "full of glimpses
and responses, of deserts and desolations." "His perceptions would be
fine and his opinions pathetic." Commiseration of Searle vs. detachment,
in "Four Meetings."
Of the posthumous work, "The Middle Years" is perhaps the most charming.
"The Ivory Tower," full of accumulated perceptions, swift illuminating
phrases, perhaps part of a masterpiece. "The Sense of the Past," less
important. I leave my comment of "The Middle Years" as I wrote it, but
have recast the analysis of notes to "The Ivory Tower."
Flaubert is in six volumes, four or five of which every literate man
must at one time or another assault. James is strewn over about
forty--part of which must go into desuetude, have perhaps done so
already.
I have not in these notes attempted the Paterine art of appreciation,
e.g., as in taking the perhaps sole readable paragraph of Pico Mirandola
and writing an empurpled descant.
The problem--discussion of which is about as "artistic" as a street
map--is: can we conceive a five or six volume edition of James so
selected as to hold its own internationally? My contention is for this
possibility.
My notes are no more than a tentative suggestion, to wit: that some such
compact edition might be, to advantage, tried on the less patient
public. I have been, alas, no more fortunate than our subject in keeping
out irrelevant, non-esthetic, non-literary, non-technical vistas and
strictures.
"THE MIDDLE YEARS"
The Middle Years is a tale of the great adventure; for, putting aside a
few simple adventures, sentimental, phallic, Nimrodic, the remaining
great adventure is precisely the approach to the Metropolis; for the
provincial of our race the specific approach to London, and no subject
surely could more heighten the pitch of writing than that the treated
approach should be that of the greatest writer of our time and own
particular language. We may, I think, set aside Thomas Hardy as of an
age not our own; of perhaps Walter Scott's or of L'Abbé Prévost's, but
remote from us and things familiarly under our hand; and we skip over
the next few crops of writers as lacking in any comparative interest,
interest in a writer being primarily in his degree of sensitization; and
on this count we may throw out the whole Wells-Bennett period, for what
interest can we take in instruments which must of nature miss two-thirds
of the vibrations in any conceivable situation? In James the maximum
sensibility compatible with efficient writing was present. Indeed, in
reading these pages one can but despair over the inadequacy of one's own
literary sensitization, one's so utterly inferior state of awareness;
even allowing for what the author himself allows: his not really,
perhaps, having felt at twenty-six, all that at seventy he more or less
read into the memory of his feeling. The point is that with the
exception of exceptional moments in Hueffer, we find no trace of such
degree of awareness in the next lot of writers, or until the first
novels of Lewis and Joyce, whose awareness is, without saying, of a
nature greatly different in kind.
It is not the book for any reader to tackle who has not read a good deal
of James, or who has not, in default of that reading, been endowed with
a natural Jamesian sensibility (a case almost negligible by any
likelihood); neither is it a book of memoirs, I mean one does not turn
to it seeking information about Victorian worthies; any more than one
did, when the old man himself was talking, want to be told anything;
there are encyclopedias in sufficiency, and statistics, and human mines
of information, boring sufficiency; one asked and isks only that the
slow voice should continue--evaluating, or perhaps only tying up the
strands of a sentence: "And how my old friend.... _Howells_...." etc.
The effects of H.J.'s first breakfasts in Liverpool, invited upstairs at
Half Moon Street, are of infinitely more value than any anecdotes of the
Laureate (even though H.J.'s inability not to see all through the
Laureate is compensated by a quip melting one's personal objection to
anything Tennyson touched, by making him merely an old gentleman
whatsoever with a gleam of fun in his make-up).
All comers to the contrary, and the proportionate sale of his works, and
statistics whatsoever to the contrary, only an American who has come
abroad will ever draw _all_ the succulence from Henry James's writings;
the denizen of Manchester or Wellington may know what it feels like to
reach London, the Londoner born will not be able quite to reconstruct
even this part of the book; and if for intimacy H.J. might have stayed
at the same hotel on the same day as one's grandfather; and if the same
American names had part in one's own inceptions in London, one's own so
wholly different and less padded inceptions; one has perhaps a purely
personal, selfish, unliterary sense of intimacy: with, in my own case,
the vast unbridgeable difference of settling-in and escape.
The essence of James is that he is always "settling-in," it is the
ground-tone of his genius.
Apart from the state of James's sensibility on arrival nothing else
matters, the "mildness of the critical air," the fatuity of George
Eliot's husband, the illustrational and accomplished lady, even the
faculty for a portrait in a paragraph, not to be matched by contemporary
effects in half-metric, are indeed all subordinate to one's curiosity as
to what Henry James knew, and what he did not know on landing. The
portrait of the author on the cover showing him bearded, and looking
rather like a cross between a bishop and a Cape Cod longshoreman, is an
incident gratuitous, interesting, but in no way connected with the young
man of the text.
The England of a still rather whiskered age, never looking inward, in
short, the Victorian, is exquisitely embalmed, and "mounted," as is, I
think, the term for microscopy. The book is just the right length as a
volume, but one mourns there not being twenty more, for here is the
unfinished work ... not in "The Sense of the Past," for there the pen
was weary, as it had been in "The Outcry," and the talent that was never
most worth its own while when gone off on connoisseurship, was,
conceivably, finished; but here in his depiction of his earlier self the
verve returned in full vigor.